Lemonade

Sometimes life lessons are hard to swallow. If the case of Montgomery County shutting down kids selling lemonade for charity, these kids have learned a hard but valuable lesson ("Montgomery County shuts kids' lemonade stand," June 17). That lesson, kids, is if you're going to do business in Montgomery County, you need to make sure that county officials get their cut! Local residents know better. That's why they don't get hassled for gouging golf fans at $50-to-$60 a car for what would normally be illegal parking on their lawns.

I will spare you the background info on my residency here and my allegiance to and support for Howard County libraries. Suffice it to say, it's lengthy and solid. I love books. I read them often in the library - Central Library, which has become disappointing. Chatter on the cell. How do I know? I hear them. Everybody hears them. Children. Candy. Sticky fingers. Grrrrrh. They, like the adults, print without paying. Kids are dropped off and left. I'm sure you're aware and probably feel for them.

Local teens Leah Getz and Kara Lynch recently set up a lemonade stand and donated the proceeds to the Havre de Grace library. Surprising library staff with their generous and unexpected gesture, the donation was made during the first week of Harford County Public Library's Summer Reading Program. The proceeds will be used to help support children and teen programming at the Havre de Grace library. Upcoming programs at the Havre de Grace library include visits from special presenters The Bubble Lady on July 14 and The Extreme Balloon Man on July 26. Children grades three and up can "Catch a Dream" by making a dream catcher on July 17 and children of all ages can participate in Stargazing Fun on July 31. Middle and high school teens are invited to get creative with a Black Light T-shirts craft program on July 21. All program information is available at HCPLonline.org.

Sometimes, keeping things bottled up is a good thing. A trend on the rise in the ever-evolving beverage scene is the bottled cocktail. D.C.'s scene has received press recently for having at least a half-dozen bars offering bottled cocktails. Still, I appreciate the art of the drink: Watching a bartender mix magic before my eyes. We can probably agree that having a bottle slid down the bar, while all sorts of Western sexy, doesn't satisfy like the first glimpse of a made-in-the-moment masterpiece.

The authorities are coming down hard on kids' lemonade stands this summer. In Georgia, three girls trying to earn enough for a trip to a water park were told they needed $50 a day in business permits. In Wisconsin, the cops busted a pair of sisters who figured they could make some money selling lemonade to people headed to a nearby car show. (The police eventually backed down.) And right here in Maryland, Montgomery County authorities shut down a stand outside the U.S. Open golf tournament in June.

Alex Scott died last summer, just when most of the horses in today's Preakness were beginning careers as 2-year-olds. Hope springs eternal for promising 2-year-old thoroughbreds. But for Alex, who was found to have cancer two days before her first birthday, hope ended Aug. 1 when she was 8. For 7 1/2 years, she had fought bravely through six surgeries and seemingly endless radiation and chemotherapy. When Alex was 4, she told her parents she wanted to operate a lemonade stand in her front yard to raise money to help find a cure for childhood cancer.

Summer afternoons, when traffic backed up outside her house on a main street in McClean, Va., 9-year-old Laura Crump brought out a plate piled high with lemons along with neon-yellow, 16-ounce cups and started pouring lemonade. A dollar a glass -- an exorbitant price, but people paid it, no doubt because it came with a lemon wedge on the side and perhaps because they were tantalized by the fake ice cream cone Laura and her brother tossed back and forth, pretending to lick, in the sweltering heat.

overheardinnewyork.com What's the point? -- Admit it - when you're on a crowded city sidewalk, you can't help but catch snippets of other people's conversations. And some of the things you pick up along the way can be pretty hilarious. The folks at this Web site do all the legwork for you, posting short exchanges they overheard from random people on the streets of New York City. What to look for --No one, from the lady on the bus to two guys in suits to a kid selling lemonade, is safe.

Local teens Leah Getz and Kara Lynch recently set up a lemonade stand and donated the proceeds to the Havre de Grace library. Surprising library staff with their generous and unexpected gesture, the donation was made during the first week of Harford County Public Library's Summer Reading Program. The proceeds will be used to help support children and teen programming at the Havre de Grace library. Upcoming programs at the Havre de Grace library include visits from special presenters The Bubble Lady on July 14 and The Extreme Balloon Man on July 26. Children grades three and up can "Catch a Dream" by making a dream catcher on July 17 and children of all ages can participate in Stargazing Fun on July 31. Middle and high school teens are invited to get creative with a Black Light T-shirts craft program on July 21. All program information is available at HCPLonline.org.

The authorities are coming down hard on kids' lemonade stands this summer. In Georgia, three girls trying to earn enough for a trip to a water park were told they needed $50 a day in business permits. In Wisconsin, the cops busted a pair of sisters who figured they could make some money selling lemonade to people headed to a nearby car show. (The police eventually backed down.) And right here in Maryland, Montgomery County authorities shut down a stand outside the U.S. Open golf tournament in June.

Sometimes life lessons are hard to swallow. If the case of Montgomery County shutting down kids selling lemonade for charity, these kids have learned a hard but valuable lesson ("Montgomery County shuts kids' lemonade stand," June 17). That lesson, kids, is if you're going to do business in Montgomery County, you need to make sure that county officials get their cut! Local residents know better. That's why they don't get hassled for gouging golf fans at $50-to-$60 a car for what would normally be illegal parking on their lawns.

Dyann Shaver from Madras, Ore., was looking for a recipe she has lost for making a nontraditional type of barbecue chicken that used concentrated lemonade in the sauce. She said that she found the recipe in an article about barbequing in Better Homes and Garden magazine in the 1970s. Steve Newman from Santa Rosa, Calif., shared his recipe for making barbequed chicken with lemonade concentrate. He said that while concentrated lemonade may seem like a surprising ingredient this chicken never fails to please.

Is the new "cash for clunkers" law really a vehicle for replacing gas-guzzling cars and trucks with the next generation of clean, green machines - or is it just a pretext for moving slightly less thirsty guzzlers from dealers' lots onto America's driveways? If the federal agency with the mission of overseeing the law does its job well, we'll find out quickly - and well before the automakers show up again on Capitol Hill, tin cup in hand, asking Congress this question from Dickens' Oliver Twist, updated for 2009: "Please, sirs, may we have some more billions?

Lemonade stands are no longer just the driveway domain for youngsters hoping to squeeze out a few dimes or quarters on a hot summer day. Just ask 16-year-old Peter Briggs. Since last fall, the high school junior from Fairfield, Conn., has been peddling products for profit through his own lemonade business. His mother also has a stand. Same with his grandmother, and a few of his teenage friends. Unlike the stand that Briggs ran in his neighborhood as a little boy, his new venture is actually an online outlet featured on his Facebook personal Web page.

THE OTHER DAY, the 10-year-old announced her intention to open a sidewalk lemonade stand."Sounds great," I said. "Where will you put it?"She said she planned to sell the lemonade from an overturned crate in front of our house."

By Sara Engram and Sara Engram,SPECIAL TO THE SUN | September 10, 2003

Along with ripe fruit and vegetables, this time of year offers an abundance of fresh herbs. We're accustomed to plucking mint to dress up a cocktail or a glass of tea, but all too often we overlook the beverage possibilities offered by other garden herbs. Inspired by Jo Asher and her lavender farm in White Hall, I recently experimented with a few other fresh herbs that were either growing in the yard or available at a reasonable price at area markets. The results were unusual, and, in some cases, even delightful.

It's a Casual Thursday at James Kendig's small business. Donning a maroon T-shirt, jean shorts and some old pins he found at his grandmother's house, James considers himself the manager. He supervises advertising, money-handling and customer service, and he takes his job seriously - even if he does work barefoot. But this isn't an ordinary operation. James is spending part of his summer running a lemonade stand to raise money for the American Cancer Society. And he's only 9 years old. "I was at a restaurant and I was just squeezing lemons into my water," said James, a rising fifth-grader at Stevens Forest Elementary School.

When it comes to investing in mutual funds, having your confidence shaken can be a good thing. Checking out a big-name mutual fund owned by my father recently, I was shocked to see that the fund was getting horrible scores from Lipper Inc. And then I saw that the fund - T. Rowe Price Equity Income - had earned a spot as one of the biggest names on "the mutual fund lemon list" issued by newsletter editor Doug Fabian. Knowing both the fund and its manager, Brian C. Rogers, reasonably well, I was a bit shocked.